Tuesday, May 03, 2016

Frugal
Poets’ Guide to Life: How
to live a poetic life, even if you aren’t a poet, my new eBook and print paperback, has just launched this summer.

Frugal Poets’ Guide to Life is part my personal journey, part life-coaching
for poets (or those who’d like to live like one), part creativity guide, and
part reference, with a special section on the modern history of the Chicago
poetry scene, including the birth of the poetry slam. In many ways, this book
is an anti-MFA guide to being a poet – or any other type of creative person. As
poet Robert Frost said, “ To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”

Some
of my more personal sections of the book trace dating a well-known
underground comics artist – dinner at a Denny’s restaurant with an Academy
Award Best Actor -- seeing a UFO in central Wisconsin – a night when poet and
men’s movement icon Robert Bly was “tarred & feathered” at a poetry reading
-- play rehearsals at David Mamet’s Chicago theater featuring then-unknown
actor William H. Macy – how I met my poet husband, Carlos -- reflections on my family relative, artist and member of the Algonquin Round Table,
Neysa McMein -- visits and stays at a variety of writers’ colonies around the
country -- and celebrating how friend Sandra Cisneros launched an international
literary career starting with a little eight-poem chapbook at a humble
bookstore in a Chicago Puerto Rican neighborhood.Available in paperback and as an eBook: Softcover ISBN 978-1-48357-142-3 ($12.98); eBook ISBN 978-1-48357-143-0 ($2.99). See the table of contents and read the book's first several pages on Amazon or obtain either version on my online bookshop.

“Frugal poet, thank you for documenting the Chicago poetry scene
as I remember it. Thank you for the abundance of writers’ quotes, spot-on about
the real writer’s life. Thanks for a great reference tool for those starting out
on their own writer’s path. Finally, frugal poet, thank you for sharing your
own personal story with generosity and, above all, honesty.”

~ Sandra
Cisneros, author of House on Mango
Street, Caramelo and A House of My
Own, and recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.

About the author: Cynthia
Gallaher is a Chicago-based published poet with three full collections of
poetry, Night Ribbons (Polar Bear
Press), Swimmer’s Prayer (Missing
Spoke Press) and Earth Elegance
(March Abrazo Press), and two chapbooks, Private,
On Purpose (Mulberry Press) and Omnivore
Odes (Finishing Line Press). The Chicago Public Library lists her among its
“Top 10 Requested Chicago Poets” and Today’s Chicago Woman magazine named her
one of “100 Women Making a Difference.” Most recently, she became a certified
yoga instructor, and is completing a new manuscript of food and medicinal herb
poems, Botanical Bandwidth.